Call for Papers: Does a New Public Governance Demand New Public Ethics? – Public Administration Review, PAR

Gjalt de Graaf, Full Professor at the Department Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Michael Macaulay, Director, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Public management is living in a new and still relatively untested age. Traditional public administration gave way to New Public Management and continues to evolve into new forms of public governance. This development has gone hand in hand, of course, with other massive social, political, economic and technological changes: individualization, globalization, information technology and many more. As a result, institutions disaggregate and realign in increasingly complex forms; hybridization and collaboration are becoming increasingly the norm while more formal institutional arrangements wither.

Remaining at the heart of each of these manifestations, however, is the concept of public ethics. As new forms of governance have emerged we have witnessed a parallel rise in the ways we try and understand integrity and ethics. Integrity systems, for example, have been developed at all levels: organizational, local, national, and international. New policy initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership have brought values such as transparency and integrity to the fore on the global stage and have led to cross-cultural conversations. Yet despite these trends, or perhaps because of them, scientific evidence about the nature, legitimacy, and ethics of new governance paradigms remains relatively scarce. The normative dimensions of new governance dimensions are not well understood.

This call for papers on the ethics of new public governance is intended to remedy limitations in current scientific and normative knowledge. We welcome empirical and theoretical papers in the following areas:

· What new institutional forms have arisen for dealing with ethical conduct, anti-corruption activity and standards of behaviour and what has their impact been?

· Are there new connections between public values (integrity, democracy, accountability, transparency) in new governance contexts, or have there been any new clashes?

· What has been the impact of the continuing reconceptualization of the citizen (as client, consumer, co-producer, collaborator, etc.) on the ethical lenses in which we frame relationships with the state?

· To what extent have increasingly diverse forms of public participation had an influence upon new forms of legitimacy in public governance?

· How do we learn about integrity and ethics? Can we meaningfully measure and evaluate integrity in the ever changing socio-political landscape?

· What is the role of organizational learning for ethical culture, climate and behaviour? Has it yielded genuine results or simply been used as window dressing?

· In what ways , if any, have collaboration, cross-agency working, and policy transfer helped to develop robust and resilient ethical practice?

We hope to provide a forum for papers that address both what we know about the changing landscape, but also how we know it. In so doing we hope to bring forth lessons that will be of practical benefit to policy makers and public servants, as well as promoting academic rigour in this exciting arena.

Manuscripts are due no later than November 30, 2016, to the coordinating guest editors g.de.graaf@vu.nl and michael.macaulay@vuw.ac.nz.